i? THE - ... / / ... '/í I I \''' *. _0 ' i \ --- U ::: no: :\ : \ . . · 0 , . THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes and Comment ANYONE who wants to do some .rl. thinking about life may well start with the statement of an advertising man who said that "postwar advertising must persuade the publIc to buy at least twice as much goods as be- fore the war." The statement belongs in one's Book of Revelations. It presents the human form at a tantalizing mo- ment in the long strip tease of economic theory. It reveals a world tyrannized by acceleration, the well-being of the inhab- itants depending on the rate at which they can persuade each other to acquire things. Before the war we bought one apple. After the war we must buy two apples or we perish. This extra apple is a most interesting piece of fruit. The apathy of the consumer, which might have stopped him short of a second ap- ple, is to be overcome by persuasion, and he shall become possessed of two apples not because of an enlarged stom- ach but because of an aroused mind. In such circumstances, it is suggested, the acquisitive. powers, by proper flagella- tion, can be maçle to keep pace with the ungovernable wheels. For one apple read two. For two apples read four.. For four apples.. . But no one must venture too far into the unknown. Thus, an advertiser's world becomes a sort of trap line along which he is both the trapper and the trapped, hunting his own pelt in the snows, a fur-bearing victim of his own snares. For a preview of a civilization built on an ever-increas- ing number of things, one need only take a trip to one's attic and sit for an hour among the trophies, remembering, of course, that twice four is eight, twice eight is sixteen, and that eventually the -houses of the world will be all attic. W E note with satisfaction that the art of penmanship has declined to a degree that makes a revival unlikely. Our fountain pen runs six months on a single filling, being used only to sign letters and checks, and most of our friends apologize when they send us a handwritten letter. Our childhood was embittered by weekly periods during which we were forced to write the way a man named Palmer thought we ought to write. We were instructed to hold the pen loosely between thumb and sec- ond finger and to keep our fingers and wrist stiff, rotating our hand on the mus- cles of our right forearm in order to form the letters. The fact that a pre- pubescent child has no appreciable mus- cles in his forearm had apparently never dawned on Palmer. Of course, we prac- ticed this idiotic exercise only during ((penmanship period," and at other times wrote with our fingers and wrist, sen- sibly paying more attention to what we wrote than how we wrote it. By the time we got muscles in our forearm, we were old enough to defy anybody who wanted us to follow the Palmer meth- od. That is called growing up-get- ting muscles and writing as you please. I T is impossible to think very deeply i,n the dentist's chair (the open mouth is, after all, the classic posture of im- becility), and this may be the reason we have never figured out how it comes about that dentists' assistants are invar- iabl y beautiful. E very dentist we have known has had a goddess caddying for him, a beauty of the calm, majestic type usually found only in bad statuary and large, gilt-framed oil paintings. Why der). tistry attracts these creatures is a mystery, though fortunately not a press- ing one. We just thought we'd men- tIon It. A RECENT letter on the editorial page of the Herald Tribune brought tears to our eyes. Sigmund Goldstein, a Socialist, wrote in to com- plain of a political cartoon which, he de- clared, completely mIsrepresented the Socialist position. Seems that the car- toon had shown F.D.R. at the wheel of the Fourth-Term Taxi, inviting Re- turning Veterans to hop in. In the back seat were various sinister little figures labelled Communist, C.I.O., and So- cialist. Mr. Goldstein ventured to point out that the Socialists have their own Presidential and Vice-Presidential can- didates, Norman Thomas and Darling- ton Hoopes. "This is the fifth time that Mr.. Thomas has run on the Socialist ticket. It is clear that Socialists not only oppose a fourth term, but were also opposed to Roosevelt's first, second, and third," he added, obviously struggling to keep his temper. The Herald Tribune headed this letter "Not Sharing 4th Term Taxi," indicating that it still didn't grasp Goldstein's point and no doubt throwing him into further par- oxysms of self-control. Here, in a nut- shell, is the peculiar doom of Socialism and all other isms, good or bad: Such institutions as the Herald Tribune, which we have heard desçribed as one of this nation's great organs of opinion, not only disagree violently with them but do not understand very clearly what they are. Whatever its faults, the two- party system is certainly a boon to peo- ple who can't count up to three. W ITH the nation facing, as it does every four years, a change of administration, we imagine that the conservative cartoonists' feelings about the prospect of a Republican victory must be somewhat ambivalent. They